Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

Duncan put the program away; there would be plenty of opportunity to study it later. Now he had eyes only for his first real look at Planet Earth, on a bright sunny day.

And that was the first problem. Never before in his life had he been exposed to such a glare. Though he had been warned, he was still taken aback by the sheer blazing ferocity of a sun almost one hundred times brighter than the star that shone gently on his own world. As the car whispered automatically through the outskirts of Washington, he kept readjusting the transmission of his dark glasses to find a comfortable level. It was appalling to think that there were places on Earth where the sun was even more brilliant than this, and he remembered another warning that had now suddenly become very real. Where the light fell on his exposed skin, he could actually feel the heat. On Titan, the very concept of ‘sunburn’ was ludicrous; now, it was all too easy to imagine, especially for skin as dark as his.

He was like a newborn child, seeing the world for the first time. Almost every single object in his field of vision was unfamiliar, or recognizable only from the recordings he had studied. Impressions flowed in upon him at such a rate that he felt utterly confused, until he decided that the only thing to do was to concentrate on a single category of objects and to ignore all the rest—even though they were clamoring for his attention.

Trees, for example. There were millions of them—but he had expected that. What he had not anticipated was the enormous variety of their shape, size and color. And he had no words for any of them. Indeed, as he realized with shame, he could not have identified the few trees in his own Meridian Park. Here was a whole complex universe, part of everyday life for most of mankind since the beginning of history; and he could not utter one meaningful sentence about it, for lack of a vocabulary. When he searched his mind, he could think of only four words that had anything to do with trees—‘leaf,’ ‘branch,’ ‘root,’ and ‘stem.’ And all these he had learned in a totally different context.

Then there were flowers. At first, Duncan had been puzzled by the random patches of color that he glimpsed from time to time. Flowers were not uncommon on Titan—usually as highly prized, isolated specimens, though there were some small groups of a few dozen in the Park. Here they were as countless as the trees, and even more varied. And once again, he had no names for any of them. This world was full of beauties of which he could not speak. Living on Earth was going to have some unanticipated frustrations...

“What was that? ” he suddenly cried. Washington swung around in his seat to get a fix on the tiny object that had just shot across the roadway.

“A squirrel, I think. Lots of them in these woods—and of course they’re always getting run over. That’s one problem no one has ever been able to solve.” He paused, then added gently: “I suppose you’ve never seen them before?”

Duncan laughed, without much humor.

“I’ve never seen any animal—except Man.”

“You don’t even have a zoo on Titan?”

“No, We’ve been arguing about it for years, but the problems are too great. And, to be perfectly frank, I think most people are scared of something going wrong—remember the plague of rats in that Lunar colony. What we’re really frightened of, though, are insects. If anyone ever discovered that a fly had slipped through quarantine, there’d be a world-wide hysteria. We’ve got a nice, sterile environment, and we want to keep it that way.”

“Hm,” said Washington. “You’re not going to find it easy to adjust to our dirty, infested world. Yet a lot of people here have been complaining for the last century or so that it’s too clean and tidy. They’re talking nonsense, of course; there’s more wilderness now that there has been for a thousand years.”

The car had come to the crest of a low hill, and for the first time Duncan had an extensive view of the surrounding countryside. He could see for at least twenty kilometers, and the effect of all this open space was overwhelming. It was true that he had gazed at much larger—and far more dramatic—vistas on Titan; but the landscapes of his own world were implacably lethal, and when he traveled on its open surface he had to be insulated from the hostile environment by all the resources of modern technology. It was almost impossible to believe that there was nowhere here, from horizon to horizon, where he could not stand unprotected in the open, breathing freely in an atmosphere which would not instantly shrivel his lungs. The knowledge did not give him a sense of freedom, but rather of vertigo.

It was even worse when he looked up at the sky, so utterly different from the low, crimson overcast of Titan. He had flown halfway across the Solar System, yet never had he received such an impression of space and distance as he did now, when he stared at the solid-looking white clouds, sailing through a blue abyss that seemed to go on forever. It was useless to tell himself that they were only ten kilometers away—the distance a spaceship could travel in a fraction of a second. Not even the starfields of the Milky Way had yielded such glimpses of infinity.

For the very first time, as he looked at the fields and forests spread out around him under the open sky, Duncan realized the immensity of Planet Earth by the only measure that counted—the scale of the individual human being. And now he understood that cryptic remark Robert Kleinman had made before he left for Saturn: ‘Space is small; only the planets are big.’

“If you were here three hundred years ago,” said his host, with considerable satisfaction, “about eighty percent of this would have been houses and highways. Now the figure’s down to ten percent—and this is one of the most heavily built-up areas on the continent. It’s take a long time, but we’ve finally cleaned up the mess the twentieth century left. Most of it, anyway. We’ve kept some as a reminder. There a couple of steel towns still intact in Pennsylvania; visiting them is an essential experience you won’t forget, but won’t want to repeat.”

“You said this was a ten percent built-up area. I find it hard to believe even that. Where is everyone?” Duncan queried.

“There are many more people around than you imagine. I’d hate to think of the activity that’s going on within two hundred meters of us, at this very moment. But because this parkway is so well landscaped, you probably haven’t noticed the surface exits and feeder roads.”

“Of course—I still have the old-fashioned picture of Terrans as surface dwellers.”

“Oh, we are, essentially. I don’t think we’ll ever develop the—ah—‘corridor culture’ you have on the Moon and planets.”

Professor Washington had used that term anthropological cliché with some caution. Obviously he was not quite sure if Duncan approved of it. Nor, for that matter, was Duncan himself; but he had to admit that despite all the debates that had raged about it, the phrase was a accurate description of Titan’s social life.

“One of the chief problems of entertaining off-worlders like yourself,” said Washington somewhat ruefully, “is that I find myself explaining at great length things that they know perfectly well, but are too polite to admit. A couple of years ago I took a statistician from Tranquility along this road, and gave him a brilliant lecture on the population changes here in the Washington-Virginia region over the last three hundred years. I thought he’d he interested, and he was. If I’d done my homework properly—which I usually do, but for some reason had neglected in this case—I’d have found that he’d written the standard work on the subject. After he’d left, he sent me a copy, with a very nice inscription.”